Jürgen Bürgin - an interview
Jürgen Bürgin - Porto, December 2022
Jürgen Bürgin is a photographer. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
His work speaks of urban, enigmatic and mythical spaces, like boxing and the circus. In his street photographs, Bürgin looks for the unusual, the poetic, and the surprising elements of everyday life across big cities throughout Europe, Asia and North America.
His work has been exhibited in several galleries and museums around the world, including the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, the Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin, the RAW Gallery in Rotterdam, the Amerika Haus in Tübingen and the Central European House of Photography in Bratislava.
PUNCH - A Visual Story is Jürgen Bürgin’s second photography book. It's an intimate and revealing journey into the world of boxing in New York, Berlin and Lisbon.
The hardcover edition, a large and imposing book with unmistakable blue and deep red tones, is an immersive and dark visual narrative that follows boxing fighters and clubs from the training and preparation phase to the thrill of the fight, and the moment of victory. A dramatic, evocative and emotional look into the vivid details of a classic sport, and its universal and timeless popular appeal.
The following interview precedes the official launch of the book in Lisbon and its worldwide promotion.
Hi Jürgen, how are you? How’s Berlin these days, what’s been catching your eye?
I’m fine! February is always a special month for me, because I moved to Berlin 24 years ago - it’s the time of the Berlin film festival. It’s a fantastic festival as it’s not only accessible for people from the movie business and for those people who have luck to get some rare tickets. There are many more cinemas involved compared to Cannes or Venice, so it’s a festival for everyone. And you know, there’s a close relation between my work in the movie business in the last decades - and my work as a photographer.
Why?
Mostly everything I’ve learned about composing images and about telling stories with photographs is influenced by movies and by my love for cinema. There are influences from many films, maybe I should mention the films of Wong Kar-wai, like Chungking Express, but also the work of Truffaut or Scorsese - just to name three famous directors.
Do you remember when and where you started shooting the images that would later be in PUNCH?
Definitely. It was in 2014, when I was in New York for a month. I’ve visited a local boxing tournament in Brooklyn, at the famous Gleason’s Gym. That was an exciting experience, and it was a very friendly family event as well. Grandfathers, who had been boxers themselves, cheered on their granddaughters at their first fights. It completely changed my idea of what boxing is about.
Gleason’s Gym, Brooklyn, New York, 2014
Why Boxing?
I always had the idea of portraying emotions, pain, blood, sweat, tears, struggle, but also movement and tensions, the contrasts of darkness and light. Boxing fights seemed to be the right place for this - and indeed they were. I was never a boxing expert - and I’m still not. I was never too much interested in the famous names of boxing, and I never could talk about a fighter being good or not. But I found that emotional link to it. It’s interesting what a boxing trainer at a club for young people, very close to where I live in Berlin-Neukölln, once said to me. He said: “If you want to teach your son something about fairness, about respect, about social relations, about self-confidence, then don’t send him to your local soccer club. Bring him to a boxing club.” And indeed I’ve seen young people getting their self-esteem in their boxing club. Those boys, sometimes girls as well, are literally taken off the streets and the boxing trainers help them to find goals in life, to learn about fairness, to discover a useful place in society. There was one moment, when I discovered this: there was a young boy winning his first boxing fight. He cheered, and danced, and triumphed, but his trainer stopped him, shouted at him, and scolded him - he first was obliged to say thank you to his opponent for the good and fair fight.
What are the major differences, visually or otherwise, that you’ve observed in the boxing scenes in New York, Berlin and Lisbon?
Well, the interesting thing about this is that I’ve learned more about the similarities of the situations and experiences boxing fighters seem to have, anywhere in the world. That’s why we could succeed in telling a visual story with my photographs, although I took those photos in three different countries. There’s always this limited set of rules, this limited number of protagonists, and this limited space where everything happens: the boxing ring. I’ve discovered this relation of boxing fights to classic drama. The famous American writer Joyce Carol Oates, who once wrote a famous book about boxing, spoke about this: “Each boxing match is a story - a unique and highly condensed drama without words.”
What photographers inspired your work in PUNCH?
Well, there are astonishingly few photography books about boxing. Most of them are either sports documentary books - or portraits of famous boxing fighters - several of them dealing with the life of Muhammad Ali. I like some of them - but that was not what I wanted to do. My biggest inspiration is a book by New York photographer Larry Fink, who took photos of several boxing events. It was decades ago, Fink is 81 years old now, and times were different in the boxing scene then. He photographed some impressive, emotional, dark, high contrast images of life in the boxing scene, and it’s a very narrative book with only 50 or so photos. I dream of having succeeded in something comparable in the time I went to boxing events - with my dark and emotional color photographs.
Cities inspire a lot of your visual research and work. What’s next?
I’m still working on a few series I’ve photographed in the past. I’m in the comfortable situation to let such series mature. To put them into the drawer and take them out again later. To write about it in review. My Vietnam series is one of those projects I’m going to work on next. But there are as well two long term projects I’m currently taking photos for: one is a series about the Berlin district of Neukölln, where I live; and the other is about life in German cities, the big cities, but also small towns - as I was born and raised in small town in Southern Germany.
PUNCH - A Visual Story is out now.
128 pages, including a booklet.
Hardcover 30 x 25 cm / English
Texts: Jürgen Bürgin, Yuri Lopes Pereira
©chumbo, december 2022
€55,00
Tax included, shipping across the European Union.
